Student ethnographies of World of Warcraft

An undergraduate ethnography class at San Antonio's Trinity University was assigned term papers that required students to observe and analyze interactions in World of Warcraft, a wildly popular massively multiplayer online role playing game. All the term papers are online on the class blog, and the cover an impressive variety of subjects, from sexism to customer service, the prisoners' dilemma, gratification in joining guilds, colonialism, and many others. Regrettably, these are only available as PDFs and not as html on the site, but they're still well worth a look.

"SHOW US YOUR T*TS!!!"1

As a researcher, I felt I initially approached the idea of sexism in the virtual
world of World of Warcraft in an almost totally unbiased way. Granted, I myself had
experienced a fewinstances of sexist behavior, but I went into my procurement of
interviewees with what I felt was a total lack of expectations as to what reactions I
would receive from the general World of Warcraft public. My forum post stated that
I was exploring possible instances of sexism towards female gamers, and using my
name in the post clearly identified me as a woman, but the post made no claims as
to whether or not I felt sexism even existed at all. However, very quickly I
discovered the true feelings of players about the topic I was exploring. Comments
such as the one above demonstrated a total lack of regard for the academic nature
of my undertaking, and instead focused on trivial and sophomoric comments about
my level of education and the personal motives individuals felt were behind my
study. Many of the sexist postings on my original thread, in my own opinion as a
researcher, justified the need for such an undertaking in the first place.

The world of any Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game is often an
intimidating one for women. The gaming industry is still viewed as a primarily 'male'
environment, and women are thought by many to be out of placeand even
unwelcome in a MMO game. While the numbers of online gamers who are women
are growing significantly, many players feel that the mindset of the industry as a
whole has not caught up to the statistics, being that games are still designed and
marketed almost entirely to men. Slightly over half of online gamers are women,
and 20-30 percent of those gamers that play MMOs are women.